After Their Nests

"Guerrillas are like birds," said General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on a recent tour of Viet Nam. "They don't have sky hooks and they can't exist on air. They've got to light somewhere, and the place to get them is in their nests." Last week Operation Cedar Falls continued to scythe through the enemy's longtime nests in the Iron Triangle 20 miles north of Saigon--razing villages and transplanting their civilian populations, bulldozing and burning away houses, fruit trees, rubber plantations, rice granaries and tropical thicket. In its largest operation of the war, employing 16,000 infantrymen, the U.S. was selectively applying a new strategy: a purposeful policy of scorched earth, not only to chase the enemy from his nests but to make those nests permanently uninhabitable.

Having already uncovered and blasted more than 500 Viet Cong tunnels in the Iron Triangle, U.S. soldiers last week snared the biggest nest of all: a vast underground city in Ho Bo woods on the triangle's western flank that almost surely housed the headquarters of the Viet Cong's Fourth Military Region, which includes Saigon. Heavily booby-trapped, it contained French and U.S. maps, diagrams of the hotels and billets that house Americans in Saigon, detailed plans for the Viet Cong suicide attack on Tan Son Nhut Airport last Dec. 4, typewriters, medical supplies, officers' sidearms and even a small cemetery. There were a few Viet Cong defenders left behind, and the G.I.s, equipped with silencer-mounted .38 pistols, pursued them through the labyrinth. After exploring the maze for 1,000 yds., the tunnel rats came up and turned the task over to units that pumped nausea gas through the system, then set about blasting it to dust.

Shrinking Sanctuaries. Once the Iron Triangle is thoroughly scorched and cleared of all civilians, it will be a free bombing zone, where anyone who moves in the 25-sq.-mi. area will automatically be fired on as a Viet Cong. But there will be little for the Viet Cong to go back to: if the U.S. has its way, even a crow flying across the triangle will have to carry lunch from now on. Moreover, the U.S. intends to spend much of 1967 scorching the enemy's earth all over Viet Nam. Next likely candidates are War Zone C, bordering on Cambodia and thought to conceal the Viet Cong's national headquarters; the U Minh "forest of darkness" in the delta; and Zone D just east of the Iron Triangle.

Zone D last week felt the first warmup. Radar-controlled B-52 bombers came over in ten waves at 30,000 ft. to rain down fire on the triple-canopy jungle concealing enemy movements. They dropped magnesium incendiary bomblets, which fell first in large clusters, then broke apart at 8,000 ft. and burst into flame as they plunged into a jungle already dried tinder-brown in places by chemical defoliants. For hours afterwards, dense smoke rolled 15,000 ft. into the air above yet another portion of the Viet Cong's rapidly shrinking sanctuaries.

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